Call centers are increasingly used to provide telephone based customer service support of many types, including sales, technical support, and others. Calls to a telephone number supported through a call center are routed by call center application software to specific individuals, referred to as “agents”, that provide information, sales and/or other support relevant to each call. Call center application software operates to route received calls to appropriate agents based on agent availability, and/or information provided by the caller, such as the number dialed or caller provided voice or key pad information indicating a requested service, product type, caller's native language, etc. Using existing call center applications, call center agents are able to work in a substantially “hands free” manner, such that the agents wear headsets having a microphone and one or two speakers, and never have to use their hands to operate their phone. The call center application automatically presents calls to the agents through the headsets, and gives them break time after each call to manually write down or otherwise enter call information describing the call. After a time threshold for manually recording call information, the agent is made available for another call.
Existing call center applications include a reporting and record keeping feature known as “activity codes”. Similar features are also referred to as “call pegs”, or “account codes”. Such features enable an agent to associate a call with one or more call categories. For example, an agent might associate a call with a “sales” activity code, a “support” activity code, or some other specific activity code, based on what happened during the call. Many specific types of information regarding a call may be encoded into an activity code, and the use of activity codes is broadly applicable. For example, activity codes may be associated with customers, and used to appropriately bill for services provided to customers through calls to the call center. When reports are generated, activity codes and other information entered by the agent, as well as caller-derived information, such as key pad data and dialed number, can be used to produce reports. Statistics can be generated based on activity codes allowing customers or service providers to determine percentages of calls or call time being used for various coded activities and/or customers. Thus, activity codes are a flexible feature, and can be used as the basis for various higher level functions. However, in existing systems, activity codes must be manually entered by agents into their telephone sets, potentially for every call they handle. This requirement of entering activity codes manually goes fundamentally against the “hand-free” nature of these call center applications, and is time consuming for the agents.
For the reasons stated above and others, it would be desirable to have a new system for handling calls to call centers that enables agents to record activity codes for calls they handle without the need for manual entry of the codes. The system should be substantially “hands-free”, so that agents hands are available for other tasks.